THE SUPPLANTER
Never did I realize so clearly the difference between what interests the
people in a great city and those inhabiting remote provinces as when, in
mid-August, I took Irma and my firstborn son down to the wholesome
breath and quiet pine shadows of Heathknowes. I had seen the autumnal
number of the _Universal_ safe into its wrapper of orange and purple. In
Edinburgh the old town and the new alike thrilled and hummed with the
noise of a contested election. There were processions, hustings, battles
royal everywhere, the night made hideous, the day insupportable.
But here, looking from the door out of the sheltering arms of Marnhoul
wood into the peace of the Valley, the ear could discern only the hum of
the pirn-mill buzzing like a giant insect in the greenest of the shade,
and farther off the whisper of the sea on the beaches and coves about
Killantringan.
Now we had taken rather a roundabout road and rested some nights on the
way, for I had business at Glasgow--a great and notable professor to
visit at the college, and in the library several manuscripts to consult.
So Irma remained with the Wondrous Duncan the Second at the inn of the
White Horse, where the coach stopped.
When I came back I thought that Irma's face looked a trifle flushed. I
discovered that, having asked the hostler to polish her shoes, he had
refused with the rudeness common to his class when only rooms of the
cheaper sort are engaged. Whereupon Irma, who would not let her temper
get the better of her, had forthwith gone down to the pantry, taken the
utensils and done them herself.
I said not much to her, but to the landlord and especially to the man
himself I expressed myself with fulness and a vigour which the latter,
at least, was not likely to forget for some time.
It was as well, however, that my grandmother was not there. For in that
case murder might have been done, had she known of the scullion's answer
and what Irma had done. Well also, on the whole, for us that she had
refused to keep us company. For having been only once in a great city in
her life, and never likely to be there again, Mary Lyon made the most of
her time. She had had two trunks when she came to our gate. Four would
not have held all that she travelled with on her way back. And when we
remonstrated on the cost, she said, "Oh, fidget! 'Tis many a day since I
cost anything to speak of to the goodman. He can brave and weel afford
to pay for a trifle o' luggage."
Accordingly she never passed a fruit stall without yearning to buy the
entire stock-in-trade "for the neighbours that have never seen siccan a
thing as a sweet orange in their lives--lemons being the more marketable
commodity in Eden Valley."
She had also as many commissions, for which she looked to be paid, as if
she had been a commercial traveller. There were half-a-dozen "swatches"
to be matched for Aunt Jen--cloth to supply missing "breadths," yarn to
mend the toes of stockings, ribbons which would transform the ancient
dingy bonnet into a wonder of beauty on the day of the summer communion.
She had "patterns" to buy dress-lengths of--from the byre-lasses brown
or drab to stand the stress of out-of-door--checked blue and white for
the daintier dairy-worker among her sweet milk and cheese.
Even groceries, and a taste of the stuff they sell in town for "bacon
ham"--to be sniffed at and to become the butt for all the goodwives in
the parish--no tea, for Mary Lyon knew where that could be got better
and cheaper, but a _Pilgrim's Progress_ for a neighbour lad who was
known to be fond of the reading and deserved to be encouraged--lastly,
as a vast secret, a gold wedding-ring which could not be bought without
talk in Eden Valley itself. Grandmother did not tell us for whom this
was intended. Nor did we know, till the little smile lurking at the
corner of her mouth revealed the mystery, when Agnes Anne came home from
the kirk and named who had been "cried" that day. It was no other than
our sly Eben--and Miss Gertrude Greensleeves was the name of the
bride--far too young for him, of course, but--he had taken his mother
into his confidence and not a man of us dared say a word. Doubtless the
women did, but even they not in the hearing of Mary Lyon.
But now we were at rest, and quite ten days ago grandmother had arrived
with her cargo. The commissions were all distributed. The parish had had
a solid week to get over its amazement. And, to put all in the
background, there had been a successful run into Portowarren and another
the same night to Balcary--a thing not often done in the very height of
summer. Yet, because the preventive men were not expecting it, perhaps
safer then than at any other time.
And above all and swamping all the endless talk of a busy, heartsome
farm-town! Ah, how good it was. Even the little god in the "ben" room,
Master Duncan Maitland MacAlpine, had times and seasons without a
worshipper, all because there was a young farmer's son in the kitchen
telling of his experiences "among the hills," with the gaugers behind
them, and the morn breaking fast ahead.
How they must get to a place where they could hide, a place with water,
where they could restore their beasts and repose themselves, a place of
great shadowing rocks in a weary land. For of a certainty the sun would
smite by day, even if the moon afforded them guidance over the waste by
night.
Or Boyd Connoway would tell of the _Golden Hind_ having been seen out in
the channel, of rafts of "buoyed" casks sunk to within three foot of the
bottom, to be fished up when on a dark night the herring craft slipped
out of Balcary or the Scaur, silent as a shadow.
Or mayhap (and this, married or single, Irma liked best of all) there
came in some shy old farmer from the uplands, or perhaps a herd, to
whose boy or girl "out at service" the mistress of Heathknowes had
brought home a Bible. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not
get a word out. They sipped their currant wine as if it were medicine
and moved uneasily on the edges of their chairs. They had excellent
manners stowed away somewhere--the natural well-bredness of the hill and
the heather, but in a place like that, with so many folk, it seemed as
if they had somehow mislaid them.
Then was Irma's time. She would glide in, her face still pale, of
course, but with such a gracious sweetness upon it that the shyest was
soon at his ease. Here was a cup, an embarrassment to the hand. She
would fill its emptiness, not with Aunt Jen's currant wine, but with
good Hollands--not to the brim, because the owner would spill it over
and so add the finishing touch to his bashfulness. She sat down by the
oldest, the shaggiest, the roughest, and in a moment (as if, like a
fairy of Elfland, she had waved her wand) old Glencross of Saltflats,
who only talked in monosyllables to his own wife, was telling Irma all
about the prospects of his hay crop, and the bad look-out there was
along the Colvend shore owing to the rabbits breeding on the green hill
pastures.
"Oh, but I'll thin them, missie," he affirmed, in response to her look
of sympathy, "ow aye, there are waur things than hare soup and rabbit
pie. Marget" (his wife) "is a great hand at the pie. Ye maun come ower
some day and taste--you and your guidman. I will send ye word by that
daft loon Davie."
Then with hardly an effort, now that the ice was broken, turning to my
grandmother, "Eh, mistress, but it was awesome kind and mindfu' o' you
to fetch the laddie a Bible a' the road frae Enbra. I hae juist been
promising him a proper doing, a regular flailing if he doesna read in it
every nicht afore he says his prayers."
Needless to say Davie had promised--but as to Davie's after performance
no facts have been put on record. Still, he had his Bible and was proud
of it.
Then Irma, safe in her married state, would set herself down by some
shy, horny-fisted fellow, all nose and knuckles. She would draw him away
from his consciousness of the Adam's apple in his throat (which he
privately felt every one must be looking at) and give him a good
sympathetic quarter of an hour all to himself. She would smile and smile
and be a villain to her heart's content, till the lad's tongue would at
last be loosened, and he would tell how he tried for first prize at the
last ploughing match, and boast how he would have been first only for
his "coulter blunting on a muckle granite stane." He would relate with
exactness how many queys his father had, the records of mortality among
the wintering sheep, the favourable prospects of the spring
lambs--"abune the average--aye, I will not deny, clean abune the
average."
So he would sit and talk, and gaze and gaze, till there entered into his
soul the strong desire to work, to rise up and conquer fate and narrow
horizons--so that in time, like a certain Duncan MacAlpine (whom very
likely, as a big country fellow, he had thrashed at school), it might
happen to him to have by his fireside something dainty and sweet and
with great sympathetic eyes and a smile--_like that_!
We had only a little while of this, however, for on the morrow Louis was
to arrive from school, safely escorted by Freddy Esquillant and
half-a-dozen students, who had made a jovial party all the way from
Edinburgh.
Now I may write myself down a selfish brute by the confession I am going
to make. But all the same, the thing is true and had better be owned up
to, all the more in the light of what afterwards happened. I had no
great wish that Louis should join our little party, which with the
advent of little Master Red Knuckles, had been rendered quite complete.
It was, I admit, an unworthy jealousy. But I thought that as Irma had
always been so passionately devoted to Louis--and also because she had,
as I sometimes teased myself by imagining, only come to me because she
had lost Louis--his coming back would--_might_, I had the grace to say
on second thoughts, deprive me of some part of my hard-earned
heritage--the love of the woman who was all to me. For with me, his
unworthy father, even Duncan Maitland had not yet begun to count. With
a man that comes later.
This is my confession, and once made, let us pass on. I had even then
the grace to be ashamed--at least, rather.
Louis arrived. He had grown into a tall lad with long hair of
straw-coloured gold, that shone with irregular reflections like muffled
moonlight on a still but gently rippling sea. He was quieter, and seemed
somehow different. He was now all for his books and solitude, and sat
long in the room that had been given him for a bedroom and study--that
with the window looking out on the wood. It was the quietest in the
house--not only because of our youthful bull of Bashan and his roaring,
but because it was at the farthest end of the long rambling house, away
from the stables and cattle sheds.
However, he seemed delighted to see Irma, and sat a long time with her
hand in his. But I, who knew her well, noticed that there was not now on
her face the old strained attention to all that her brother said or did.
It was in another direction that her ears and thoughts were turned, and
at the first cry from baby's cot she rose quietly, disengaging her hand
without remark before disappearing into the bedroom-nursery. In another
moment I could see my grandmother pass the window drying her hands on
her apron. I knew from the ceasing of the plunging thud of the dasher
that she had called a substitute to the churning. The dasher was now in
the hands of Aunt Jen, who handled it with a shorter, more irrascible
stroke.
Left alone with him, I talked to Louis a while of his studies, of the
games the boys played at school, of the length of the holidays. But to
all these openings and questionings he responded in a dull and
uninterested fashion. I could not but feel that he resented bitterly
the marriage which had come between his sister and himself. He had had,
of course, a place to come to on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons, but I
had seen little of him then. My work was generally absorbing, and when I
had time to give to Irma, I wanted her all to myself. So I had fallen
into a habit, neither too kind nor yet too wise, of taking to my writing
or my proofs as often as Louis came to our house.
Now, from the glances he cast at the door by which Irma had gone out, I
saw that he too was suffering from jealousy--even as I had done. He was
jealous of that inarticulate Jacob which comes into so many houses as a
tiny Supplanter--the first baby!
After a quarter of an hour he rose and got out of the room quickly. I
could hear him go to his own room and shut the door. When Irma and Mary
Lyon had reduced our small bundle of earthquake to a sulky and plaintive
reason, she came back to talk to her brother. Finding him gone, she
asked where Louis was, and immediately followed him to his chamber,
doubtless to continue their conversation.
But she returned after a while with a curious gleam on her face, saying
that doubtless travel had given her brother a headache. He had shut his
door with the bolt, and was lying down.
I was on the point of asking Irma if he had answered when she called to
him, but remembered in time that I had better not meddle in what did not
concern me. If Louis behaved like a bear, it would only throw Irma the
more completely upon me. And this, at the time, I was selfish enough to
wish for.
Afterwards--well, I had, as all men have, many things to reproach myself
for--this stupid jealousy being by no means the least or the lightest.
Still, on the whole I had a great deal of peace and the composure of
the quiet mind during these first days at Heathknowes. My father, almost
for the first time in his life, withdrew himself from his desk, and took
a walk beyond the confines of the Academy Wood to see his grandson,
keeping, however, his hands still behind him according to his custom in
school. My mother, even, arranged with Agnes Anne to take the
post-office duties during her absence, and seemed pleased in her quiet
way to hold the boy in her arms. In this, however, she was not
encouraged by Mary Lyon, who soon took Duncan away on the plea that he
cried, except with her. Duncan the Second certainly stopped as soon as
he felt my grandmother's strong, well-accustomed hands grasp him. Yet
she was not in the least tender with him. On the contrary, she heaved
him, as it were promiscuously, over one shoulder with his head hanging
down her back, and tucking his swathed legs under one armpit she
proceeded about her household business, as if wholly disembarrassed--all
the while Duncan never uttering a word.
But through all the talk of the weather and the crops, the night runs to
Kirk Anders and the Borgue shore, the capture made by the preventives at
the Hass of the Dungeon, the misdoings of Tim Cleary who had got seven
days for giving impudence to the Provost of Dumfries in his own
court-room, there pierced the strange sough of politics.
The elections were upon us also in Galloway, and the Government
candidate was reported to be staying at Tereggles with the Lord
Lieutenant. He had not yet been seen, but (it was, of course, Boyd
Connoway who brought us word) his name was the Honourable Lalor
Maitland, late Governor of the Meuse--a province in the Low Countries.